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Comment by tjohns | Hacker News Reader

"Incurred violations" should be effectively $0. How often are you getting a traffic ticket? I think the last time I got a ticket was a decade ago...

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If you live in a city, parking tickets are fairly inevitable. I am sure some folks get away with none but at least in SF I have gotten tickets that were not even for the correct meter and it’s takes more time (at least used to) to fight it than pay the money.

I lived in LA for over a decade with a car and got zero parking tickets. I wouldn't call it inevitable.

I've never lived in Los Angeles but the one that gets you in San Francisco if you do street parking is the street cleaning, and the random vandalizations.

Great? Too many variables such as not having to park on the street or bad/good luck. If you live somewhere that has street cleaning, street parking and meters there is a good chance of getting a ticket. Not everyone but the likelihood increases and most of LA does not really check most of those boxes at least in the areas I have been.

Street cleaning days/times are posted and if they aren't - you can contest and win the case. Meters? It's easy to NOT park in one hour zone if you need more than an hour. It's easy to avoid parking next to fire hydrant.

I have a friend that often parks in 30 minutes zone, for her hour-long yoga, sometimes she gets a ticket, but that's a gamble she is willing to make. You don't magically get tickets in big city, you get tickets because you ignored the rules willingly. Couldn't find parking because you were in a rush? Who decided to not account for "time to find parking time"?

Cool story. YMMV but for anyone that has lived in more urban cities it’s pretty normal to get at least a few parking related tickets. Not always but also not rare. In my example I already shared I would get meter tickets especially on my motorcycle where the looked at the wrong meter stall. Too much trouble to bother fighting. Just a cost of living in a city.

Glad it works for you but it’s not unreasonable to consider it a partial cost of living in a city. It’s easy to pick out the folks that have not owned cars in dense cities.

Spread across a city probably more than you think, especially if you include parking tickets. I've never had a driving ticket, and maybe 4 parking ones over decades, but I'm probably on the lower end of the curve. In their first 40 days of operation, Oakland's speed cameras issued 82,000 tickets according to reports. I welcome those as they make streets safer, and I think they should be low cost, but high frequency.

I would expect tickets issued during the first 40 days to be higher than later, as people haven't adjusted yet

Or lower because the system is under public scrutiny and they don't wanna tune it for revenue just yet. Hard to say because nobody who makes such decisions gets that high in government by writing down their deliberation on such matters.

Yeah, that seems like an odd factor to include. The whole message of fines is supposed to be "don't do these specific anti-social things" not "be sure to factor in the arbitrary charges you'll be hit with".

You'd be surprised at how many people will only see the latter. When they introduced congestion pricing in NYC, there were actually people who were commenting, completely unironically, along the lines of "There's no way I'm going to pay that, I'll just take the train. That'll show em!"

They 100% saw the fee as solely a means to tax residents, and didn't even consider that the primary purpose could be to change behavior.

I saw some wildly ignorant videos on YouTube of objectively wealthy people complaining about needing to driving (a few blocks!) to 59th Street to visit a relative, but needing to pay the congestion fee. I think these people have no idea how insulated there are from the Real World.

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